Mobile phones are commonplace today and they provide users with ever more sophisticated features and services, for example services such as music downloads and video streaming. For users to access network services such as video streaming, users often have to first register themselves with the service. The registration process not only allows the service provider to authenticate the user, but also enables the service provider to bill the user for the service.
Common methods of user registration involve the user entering various credentials such as a username, a password, date of birth and so on, which are stored by the service provider. When the user subsequently wishes to access a service from the service provider, the user enters his username, password and perhaps some other previously registered details, which are checked against the details held by the service provider. As already suggested, the mechanism for registration is especially important when the user is registering for a service that requires some sort of payment by the user to access the service, a so called pay service such as downloading or streaming video. The service provider should only grant access to a pay service when a suitable level of authentication is achieved. Furthermore, the service provider needs to be confident that the user requesting the service is the person they say they are and that they have the ability to pay e.g. service provider has verified credit card details during registration or can use reverse SMS to take payment.
The registration mechanism using username and password is often implemented through a web interface and is relatively easy for the service provider to provision. However, the problem is that users are required to manually enter significant amounts of information which can be both time consuming, especially on a mobile device where there usually no QWERTY input device, and susceptible to unintentional errors. This is even more troublesome if credit card details need to be provided.